


Shelter

by yuutsuhime



Series: 東港 | Higashiminato [5]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Abusive Parents, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Character Study, Divorce, Gen, Loneliness, Rural Japan, Slice of Life, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2020-10-19 16:03:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20659937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuutsuhime/pseuds/yuutsuhime
Summary: During a winter snowstorm, a 16-year old girl spends time with local adults to avoid her divorced, alcoholic mother.





	Shelter

**Author's Note:**

> A legacy work, presented as written in 2016.
> 
> Jaya is 16.

Mom said she sold my winter coat, because _I paid money for it, Jaya, and I can sell it if I want to_. I didn't want to talk about alcohol or child support money and Mom said "I don't like it when you judge me" when she spoke at all. She was in the hall and I was pretending to be asleep in my room and the bottles were in the trash outside. I'd heard them clink against each other as she'd carried them out, with snow pressing under her shoes. She wasn't secretive about them any more.

Mom spent a lot of time in bed or driving and one day she was either not going to wake up in the morning or have a car accident. She'd said that herself. It was called _being sarcastic, Jaya, I'm not going anywhere_.

"You're a bitch and I hate you," I said. "Being sarcastic, obviously."

She glowered at me from the door. She was leaving again, which was why I'd said that, and her boyfriend and _your future stepfather, Jaya, isn't it thrilling_ had driven his sports car and was idling in our driveway making fun of Dad's old sedan.

This was how night worked now. Mom slept during the day and went down to the city at night to get drunk and I guess she was somehow still finding time to do the tax returns and pay the bills and get the writing done for her job. She said things like _Jaya, don't worry about me_, and _I'd let you come with if you were old enough_. She was going to be a cool mom. Then she'd come home and throw up and her boyfriend would help her throw up and they'd be asleep next to each other on the sofa, tangled like washed-up tree limbs, with smoke still lingering in the air.

"Be a good girl at school," he'd say if I woke him up. He didn't know my name. I didn't have the energy to tell him to fuck off.

* * *

"Mom's drinking again," I told Chef Takeshi as he was sipping a shot of _sake_. He squinted at me and we both tensed as cold air came through the door. The two police officers were on the way out and Chef yelled at them to close the door and the older police officer turned to his partner and yelled at her to close the door and she blushed, embarrassed, and apologized to him. She said, "I'm sorry", not to us but to him, and then shifted her posture as he looked down at her. He had tall boots and left larger prints than she did when they walked out to the car.

"That's a bad thing, right?" said Chef, wiping down the tables. "The drinking?"

"I'm gonna start staying late again if that's all right," I said. "I'd offer to help fish or cook but you probably wouldn't like that."

Chef heaved a sigh that was somewhere between stretching and back pain and looked at me, disapproving, and said he'd think about it again, but only because it's winter. He crumpled up the dish rag and threw it behind the kitchen faucet and turned the lights down – the restaurant stopped being busy and cluttered in the dark. All the relics Chef kept, like photographs of his father and his boat and his father's old army sword and his father's shrine and his son as a boy and at graduation – all these faded into the background and we became alone again.

"I don't have a coat," I said, and he sighed, told me to wait, and trudged out into the parking lot to start the truck's heater, came back, and then we sat silently at a restaurant table. It was the one with the unbalanced legs and the chipped surface that my Dad had always been trying to fix.

"Jaya, you know I can't take care of you all the time," Chef said.

"I know," I said.

"I can't fix everything. You can talk to the school counselor or Officer Mayu when she's here, but I can't talk to them for you and you _know_ this. You're not twelve."

I looked down and we sat for a while longer.

"I can walk home," I said.

"It's too cold," he said, and he fished his car keys out again and walked into the snow. Soon we were both in the truck there was just the hum of the engine, the murmur of upbeat hosts on the radio, and the soft glitter of snowflakes over the windshield.

"It's a nice night," Chef Takeshi said. He held the steering wheel with one hand and fumbled his gloves around his lap with the other.

"It _is_ too cold," I said.

"Look, I'm sorry I got frustrated," he said.

"It's fine."

"Is she really drinking that badly?"

"I don't _know_ what 'badly' means, okay? She just is. I'm sorry that I'm mad, okay? I don't really know what to do."

Chef breathed out, fogging the inside of the windshield.

"Thanks for asking," I said, more quietly.

We kept driving.

* * *

I found more beer in the refrigerator and poured it down the sink before school, when Mom was asleep. The phrase 'my mother is an alcoholic' kept coming to mind. It wasn't true since it didn't sound right to put the word 'alcoholic' next to the word 'is', which was an opinion, but Mom had cried last night. She came up to my door while she was crying and said _Jaya, tell me I'm a bad parent_, and I'd said no and she said _Good_, and gone back to her room.

I'd often fantasized about going up to Officer Mayu and saying _my mother is an alcoholic_ because maybe her response would be different from Chef Takeshi's flat "Oh." Chef was a good person but Officer Mayu was a police officer and could do things like lift cars out of frozen rivers with her bare hands, and once I said the word 'alcoholic' and 'is' next to each other she'd come home and do something that made everything sort of okay. In the non-fantasy real world Officer Mayu was shivering down at the train station because she couldn't figure out how to light a wood-burning stove from the seventies.

"Here," I said, shoving an old math test into the furnace. "This isn't worth much."

"You should wear a jacket," she said, looking over the sweatshirt I'd taken out of Dad's old closet. "That's probably not even up to the school dress code."

I narrowed my eyes and pushed my way onto the bench over Officer Mayu so I could start the furnace with my lighter. "I don't care about the dress code," I said. "I'm cold too, you know."

"I'm _very_ cold," she admitted. "I suppose you're going to dig into me for being a city person."

"Chef says you got stuck in a rut the other day."

She sighed. "I'm serious now, I'm on station duty."

This was a joke because the train station's unisex bathroom was bigger than the actual train station. The station itself contained the furnace, a bench, a vending machine (that never got restocked, thank you _Ito-En_), and two open doors. It looked great in the summer when the sun set over the mountains and reflected in the rice paddies, but in the winter we just got snow indoors.

"You didn't stand up for yourself the other day," I said.

"What?"

"At the restaurant. I thought you hated Officer Watanabe's guts."

"He's my partner and I'm not going to bad-mouth him on the job. Especially to you. You tell everyone everything."

"I know," I said. The phrase 'my mother is an alcoholic' was back, lodged into my mouth like one of Chef's fish hooks. "I heard you calling him a chauvinist."

"I did _not_."

"You did."

"I might have been a bit drunk," she said.

I probably said something like "Oh," in response, and we talked about things that didn't matter until the train plowed its way up from civilization and took me to the school bathroom where I finally pried the fish hooks out of my mouth. I took them out and whispered 'my mother is an alcoholic' just to try it; just to get a feel for the words, and then I washed them all down the sink with soap.

* * *

I was home and it was snowing and dark indoors since Mom wasn't home again. I had a cup _ramen_ and another failed test and I was sort of watching television – really I was watching how the light played off the surface of our kitchen table, which was still big enough for three people. It was uncanny and I decided I wanted a television in my room or a smaller table. Even the rickety table at Chef's would do.

The news said someone had skidded off the road. There was a picture of a car upside-down in a river, with neon rescuers clambering up and down the embankment in cones of helicopter light. It was interesting how the snowflakes existed only in the searchlight, fading into existence and then out, falling unnoticed at the bottom of the frame. The driver was dead, of course.

_Reports suggest that the driver was intoxicated_, said the reporter, who was an elderly man with a bad toupee that probably fell off his scalp whenever he bowed. He didn't care. He said: _Our hearts go out to the family_ and later he said it was _only a ten to twenty minute delay for people driving to Yokohama_. The driver was a woman who was a mother who was dead and I turned the lights on even though Mom didn't drive to Yokohama, and I left them on even after the news moved on to baseball and blizzard warnings and I went upstairs and slept. The lights stayed on overnight. Mom found her way home eventually.

"You left the lights on last night," she said in the morning.

"You were out."

"This house is your responsibility too, Jaya," she said. She wasn't looking at me, just sitting at the table sifting through the mail with a glass of tea in the other hand, and I knew better than to ask if anything was from Dad. Dad used to send mail until it stopped appearing in the mailbox and started appearing in the trash can and finally moved online where Mom couldn't read it first or hear. In our conversations he'd point out how parts of the house had changed if he could see them through the webcam. We would talk about school and grades and the future and he'd end with _I miss you, Jaya_ because he had another conference to attend, and I understood what he meant. He had to do work in Seattle. Our calls lasted too long anyway.

* * *

The blizzard started unexpectedly on the train back home, and by the time I got back snow was piled vertically against the platform and I could barely even make out the mountain or the harbor. The air and snow stung and Officer Mayu said it was time to get indoors and we pushed through gusts of wind down to the fish market. I didn't talk because the wind froze my teeth and sucked the sound out of my voice, but once we were stomping snow onto the doormat Officer Mayu asked, "Is this normal?"

"That was bad," I said.

"Survivors!" said Chef from down the hall, and a few others in the restaurant raised their voices as well.

"Oh come on," I shouted back.

Inside, there were several other chefs from the fish market clustered around, as well as the Seven-Eleven clerk's elderly husband and the equally elderly temple groundskeeper. Both of the men were playing chess and there were intermittent cheers from the group whenever a piece was killed. All four tables had been moved together next to the radiator, with jackets and scarves draped nearby to dry out; I put my sweatshirt down next to them and loudly declared that the temple had been here long before the Seven-Eleven and I was choosing the righteous side.

"Now because we're all certainly going to die from the storm," said Chef, "I'm making a special offer. We have some tea in the back. The television's out. Mayu, do you drink?"

She shook her head, noticed her hair was full of snow, and started combing it out. She apparently carried a comb in her belt pouch along with her gun and handcuffs, because, she said, rolling her eyes, _I'm a proper lady and all_. Officer Watanabe wasn't here – he was apparently stuck in traffic down on the highway. A different car accident, probably.

"Is the land-line still working?" I asked Chef, and he handed me a yellowed rotary-dial receiver and Mom picked up her cell phone on the other end and hung up right away because she was too tired to let it ring itself to death. I called several more times to bother her and she finally answered with a flat "What."

"Are you home?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, and hung up. I thought about calling back and telling her there was miso soup and rice left in the refrigerator but then she'd probably figure out her beer was gone if she hadn't already and then I'd have to cook _again_ the next morning. Chef never did takeout anyway; his winter menu sarcastically offered to sell microwave _ramen_ at ten times the price since he technically needed to be a restaurant to keep his liquor license, otherwise, he said, someone from the prefecture would come and buy a drink and then take the license away.

"We have one more cup _ramen_, by the way," Chef said. "But I don't want to open the storeroom because it's actually a decent temperature in here. So we're going to _jan-ken_ for it."

"I haven't eaten dinner yet," I told Chef. "Everything's all backed up through Kyoto. It said there was an antelope collision on some other local line."

"Hell," Chef breathed. "You take it, then. Did you get through to your mom?"

"Yeah. She didn't say much."

"She's safe?"

"Yeah," I said.

"I haven't seen her out in a while. You don't talk about her much, either."

"She drives sometimes," I said.

"How's Dad in America?"

"Still there."

Chef frowned. "That's too bad. He could hold a great conversation. Didn't know a damn thing about Japan though."

Dad talked about a lot of things, like _is your Mother still drinking_ and how he was worried for her; but he was overseas so he couldn't have worried too much. One night Mom had said _Jaya, I wish your father were here_ and I said I understood. There was no blizzard that night. Mom had cooked food and set the table while I was at school, and we were both home that day. I'd said, "Thanks, Mom," and she just nodded and washed the dishes and went back to bed and I stayed up to make sure she was actually sleeping.

"If she's up there alone in the storm I could drive you," said Chef.

"She'll be fine," I said. Chef looked at me, and I repeated, "She'll be fine." I didn't want to go home, even if there was no way Mom got more beer from somewhere and she'd definitely eaten in the past few days – she'd _had_ to. I just wanted to sit there in the warmth of the last few hours before the blizzard died down, where everything still kind of made sense and cars and drunk drivers didn't sink into rivers. I wanted to say that she was an alcoholic, to Officer Mayu and everyone in the restaurant, and I wanted to say that I was afraid, but instead I just listened as the storm slowly faded away into the background, overpowered by the voices indoors. I was not cold here.


End file.
